Keeping the Moon By Sarah Dessen Brittany Struminger When the project was first assigned, I talked to my sister, who just started college, and she told me that the books that she had read by Sarah Dessen were really good. Because I value my sister’s opinion, I decided that I would read one. I chose Keeping the Moon because the book seemed to be focused more on girls experiencing life. Genre: Keeping the Moon by Sarah Dessen fits into the category of young adult fiction, which focuses on a teenager who grows up in some way. In the book the main characters are Colie, Morgan, and Isabel. They are all close in age; Colie is 15 and Morgan and Isabel are in their early twenties. The story narrows in on Colie’s struggle to figure out where she fits in. Young adult fiction focuses on the main character starting with an issue and overcoming it throughout the book, usually ending with a realization of some kind. There is also usually a romantic interest for someone (it doesn’t matter who). Keeping the Moon fits in with all of these characteristics of the genre. As in Twilight or even Life As We Knew It, Keeping the Moon also has characters going through issues with what their parents think of them. In this case, however the plot is totally realistic, unlike the others where there are supernatural elements. This book does not fit into any other genres; it is realistic young adult fiction. Summary of Plot: The book opens with Colie getting on a train. Her mother, Kiki Sparks, has become a famous aerobic instructor because she lost a ton of weight and started teaching it. Colie also recently lost a lot of weight. When she gets to Colby, North Carolina her first impression of Colby is not great. When she goes out to look at the city, she ends up at the Last Chance Bar and Grill where she meets Morgan and Isabel. Morgan and Isabel are both in their early twenties and Morgan is engaged. Isabel is mean to Colie right off the bat. Morgan makes Isabel apologize to Colie. Later, Colie starts working at the Last Chance Bar and Grill and Morgan and Isabel become her support system. They, along with her crazy aunt and Norman, a painter, help her get through and grow out of being so insecure and thinking of herself in a bad way. Themes and “Big Ideas”: One of the major themes in this book is acceptance. There are many different types of acceptance throughout the book. Colie goes through many different times where she has to accept different things about herself, other people, or the situation. For instance, at the end of the book, Colie accepts that everyone looks goofy when they dance and this gives her the freedom to have fun. Also, Colie thinks that Mira is keeping to herself and that she won’t admit that she cares about what people say about her; by the end of the book Colie realizes that Mira really doesn’t care about what people say. This is an example of two different types of acceptance: Mira accepts herself for who she is and Colie accepts that she doesn’t know everything. The whole idea of the book is that Colie has to learn to accept herself. Isabel and Morgan are the people that help her all throughout the book to realize she isn’t what she thinks she is. She could be so much more if she accepted herself and also accept the friendship that people want to have with her. Morgan has to accept the fact that her fiancé is not treating her right. Isabel always tells Morgan that he cheats on her and asks why he doesn’t give Morgan a number so that she could call him and about the girl he is always with. Morgan never would accept the fact that he wasn’t actually in to her and that he was always using her. In the end, Morgan has to accept that she will be okay and that her and Mark are over. Characters: Colie is a15-year-old girl that no one really likes at home. She is very insecure about herself because of what people say about her. When she first met Morgan and Isabel her first impression was a little different. Colie would think of herself as ugly, annoying, and a lot of other things because of what people say about her at home. Throughout the book Colie has to make a lot of adjustments to herself in her mind. Morgan and Isabel ended up being those people that would lead her out of the bad thoughts about herself. Morgan was more calm and then she thought of Isabel as a spaz who makes a big deal about everything. Morgan is more of the sympathetic type of person. When Colie first meets Morgan she is all calm and asked Colie “Can I help you?” while Isabel is threatening to quit her job because of the customers that she had. Morgan wasn’t really worrying about what Isabel was doing because she had been used to it. Morgan had a fiancé named Mark who was a baseball player. He never gave her a number on where to call him, never could tell her where his games were, so she could go and see him play. Mark would just randomly come and surprise her in town and stay a night and leave the next morning. Isabel would always tell Morgan that he was using her and didn’t actually like her but Morgan would never listen. Then when Morgan got the idea to go and see him she found out that he was married to another girl who was also pregnant. When Morgan ran in after finding out that Mark was cheating on her with another girl Colie went into the bathroom and Morgan was talking to her about having best friends. Colie couldn’t really relate because she never really had a best friend but when Morgan was crying to Colie she was there to help. Isabel has a different approach on how to help people on how to interact with people. She has more of a foul mouth than any of the others. The first time we see her, she is described as a “tall bony girl throwing some kind of fit” who is cussing about her customers. She knows how to get people out of their shell but she doesn’t sugar coat things. When Colie, Morgan and Isabel are on their girls night out at the beach, Isabel tells Colie to “’Walk with your head up high,’ she [says] quietly, firmly. ‘Shoulders back. Don’t smile. And don’t look at anyone.’” This quote describes Isabel because she isn’t like Morgan who would be sweet about the way Colie looks, where Isabel is more commanding. When Colie first goes to Isabel’s house Isabel told Colie that “’ She needed to pluck her eyebrows and do something with her hair.’” Isabel told her straight up and didn’t mean for it to be rude but she said it for constructive criticism. Vocabulary: Jaunty- having a cheerful manner; “Morgan turned with a jaunty swing of her skirt.” Mobile- decorative structure hanging from the ceiling; “The room was packed: canvases lined the walls, stacked against each other, and hanging from the ceiling were at least ten mobiles, all of them shifting in the breeze coming in behind me.” Eccentric- slightly strange; “Did you know Mira’s well… a little eccentric?” Delicately- subtlety; “Well I said, somewhat delicately, it’s just that you have so much here that’s already secondhand and not quite working.” Stratification- arranging people into classes; “Either way, when I was only two months into a new school, fat with no friends (other fat kids wouldn’t hang out with me because I was new, part of the complex stratification even among the losers at Central Middle), my mother spent all the grocery money to buy me a new pair of Misses Plus jeans and a cute top.” Similar Existing Works: Keeping the Moon is similar to the movie The Last Song because both of the main characters are girls who are teenagers that are going to a different place to live over the summer. Ronnie in The Last Song was going to live with her dad for the summer because her parents were divorced and she didn’t want to go because she didn’t have a good relationship with her father. Colie was going to live in Colby with her Aunt Mira because her mom had to go on a tour in Europe. Another similarity the stories both have is an interest in boys. Ronnie meets a guy named Will at the beach and they end up liking each other and the Colie met Norman and they started off as friends and then later in the book they end up being in a relationship. The biggest similarity throughout the whole book was that Ronnie and Colie both started out as not really liking where they went for a while and as the story line went on they started to realize that it wasn’t that bad and that they both had to accept different things throughout the story. Colie had to start to accept that people do like her and that she is pretty but she has to let herself go and just be confident. On the other hand, Ronnie has to accept the fact that her father is sorry and that he didn’t tell her that he was sick because he wanted to spend every moment that he could with her and her little brother without being on medication. Both of the stories fall into the same genre of young adult fiction. Major Conflict: Colie’s lack of self-esteem is a pretty big conflict because it affects the way that she thinks of herself. Colie would believe everything that everyone would say about her and her lack of confidence would keep her from living and enjoying life. After a long time of people saying rude things, she began to believe them. People start to believe what they are being told because they don’t have anyone who likes them or tells them that they aren’t what other people say they are. When you never stand up for yourself everyone will start to take advantage of you and then you are stuck in a box until someone is there to help you to get out of it. Morgan and Isabel are the two girls in the book who take Colie out of her comfort zone and make sure to get Colie to think that she is pretty and that someone could actually like her but before that could happen she had to believe in herself and stand up to people when they say rude things about her. When Colie met Josh, a guy on the beach, when she was walking to the car to get beer for Isabel. Colie was kind of nervous to talk to him but she got through the conversation. Later, when he called her over again, she was nervous to go and Isabel told her to go. When she got there Caroline Dawes was standing there and said something rude and Colie stood up for herself. Colie finally had a break through and gained confidence in herself. Symbolic Picture: The reason that there is a symbolic connection is that Colie had Morgan and Isabel to pull her out of her hard times and make her feel better when she was upset. I have those friends, too, in Alex and Caroline (the other two girls in the picture). We dance together and we don’t always get along, but we will be friends forever. They know how to make me feel better and know me so well that by the look on my face they would know what kind of mood I am in. I wouldn’t have to tell them. I think that Colie, Morgan, and Isabel had that same kind of relationship as well.
Synopsis: When Charley is not invited to his daughter Marie’s wedding he gets really upset and decides to go back to his old family home in Pepperville Beach to commit suicide. He tries and fails twice on the drive there. His mother has been dead for eight years but Charley sees her when he awakes from the second attempt. His mother (Posey) looks and acts exactly the same as she did before she died. Charley has the gift of one more day with his mother, which he spends going to visit some of her friends who need her help preparing for death. While he spends the day with his mother, he recalls memories from his childhood and young adulthood with growing up with a single mother and very distant and disappointing father.
Characters: Charley “Chick” Benetto: He is the main character of this book. He had a baseball career when he was younger but it never went anywhere. He became a salesman and an alcoholic. Charley is a pretty disappointed and unhappy man and comes to the conclusion that he wants to commit suicide. He feels bad about not being there when his mother passed away. After the one special day (limbo stage between life and death) that he got to spend with his mother, he starts to live his life more fully.
Pauline “Posey” Benetto: Charley’s mother has been dead for eight years and is happy to spend one day with her son again. When Charley was just a little boy, she kicked her husband out of the house when she found out that he had another wife, becoming a single mother raising two small children. This was in the early 60’s in a small town, and she was not treated well for being a divorcee. She spent her life being a hair dresser and a nurse. When Charley got into college she was very proud of him and then she was very disappointed when he decided to drop out to become a baseball player. In the day that she spends with Charley, she teaches him many lessons so that when he wakes up from his coma, his idea of who he thought he was changes.
Maria: She is Chick’s estranged daughter. We don’t know why they are so estranged but maybe it is because she felt betrayed by Chick after the divorce. She decides not to invite her father to her wedding. When she was fourteen, she was the one who found her grandmother's body and a little more than a year later her family collapsed. Two years after Chick’s suicide attempt, Maria found him at a baseball park in Pepperville Beach and they reconnected. She is actually the narrator of this story, but we don’t find that out until the end.
Essential Conflict: The big conflict of this story is that Chick is unhappy with his life. When he found out that his daughter got married it pushed him over the edge. He went to Pepperville Beach and, on the way, attempted to kill himself twice. When he jumped of the overpass and awoke to see his mother is when the story hit its turning point.
Quotes: “Let me guess. You want to know why I tried to kill myself.”
“This is a story about a family and, as there is a ghost involved, you might call it a ghost story.”
“I was a mama’s boy from the day on.”
“You can’t lose your mother, Charley.”
“If my mother said it, I believed it.”
Main Theme: The main theme of For One More Day seems to be betrayal. Throughout the story there are three different timelines and betrayal is present in all of them. One timeline follows his childhood, where Chick feels betrayed by his mother because she won't let him see his father. In the present time Chick feels that he has let-down his mother because he wasn't there when she had a heart attack. Also, Chick feels ashamed because he turned his back on everything that his mother wanted for him. The theme continues in this timeline when Chick realizes that his father had actually had another wife and family. The third timeline are letters that he had written specifically about times that he had betrayed his mom by not standing up for her. These are juxtaposed to writings about times that his mother stood up for him, which makes the theme more prominent.
"Video" Commentary: I really enjoyed this book because I liked the way that there were three story lines and when you get closer to the end of the book they all come together. The way Albom wrote this book made the story also a lot more interesting. Even though it was a sad book, it had a good ending. After reading this book, I would like to read more books that he has written and compare the way he wrote them.
Brittany Struminger
When the project was first assigned, I talked to my sister, who just started college, and she told me that the books that she had read by Sarah Dessen were really good. Because I value my sister’s opinion, I decided that I would read one. I chose Keeping the Moon because the book seemed to be focused more on girls experiencing life.
Genre:
Keeping the Moon by Sarah Dessen fits into the category of young adult fiction, which focuses on a teenager who grows up in some way. In the book the main characters are Colie, Morgan, and Isabel. They are all close in age; Colie is 15 and Morgan and Isabel are in their early twenties. The story narrows in on Colie’s struggle to figure out where she fits in. Young adult fiction focuses on the main character starting with an issue and overcoming it throughout the book, usually ending with a realization of some kind. There is also usually a romantic interest for someone (it doesn’t matter who). Keeping the Moon fits in with all of these characteristics of the genre. As in Twilight or even Life As We Knew It, Keeping the Moon also has characters going through issues with what their parents think of them. In this case, however the plot is totally realistic, unlike the others where there are supernatural elements. This book does not fit into any other genres; it is realistic young adult fiction.
Summary of Plot:
The book opens with Colie getting on a train. Her mother, Kiki Sparks, has become a famous aerobic instructor because she lost a ton of weight and started teaching it. Colie also recently lost a lot of weight. When she gets to Colby, North Carolina her first impression of Colby is not great. When she goes out to look at the city, she ends up at the Last Chance Bar and Grill where she meets Morgan and Isabel. Morgan and Isabel are both in their early twenties and Morgan is engaged. Isabel is mean to Colie right off the bat. Morgan makes Isabel apologize to Colie. Later, Colie starts working at the Last Chance Bar and Grill and Morgan and Isabel become her support system. They, along with her crazy aunt and Norman, a painter, help her get through and grow out of being so insecure and thinking of herself in a bad way.
Themes and “Big Ideas”:
One of the major themes in this book is acceptance. There are many different types of acceptance throughout the book. Colie goes through many different times where she has to accept different things about herself, other people, or the situation. For instance, at the end of the book, Colie accepts that everyone looks goofy when they dance and this gives her the freedom to have fun. Also, Colie thinks that Mira is keeping to herself and that she won’t admit that she cares about what people say about her; by the end of the book Colie realizes that Mira really doesn’t care about what people say. This is an example of two different types of acceptance: Mira accepts herself for who she is and Colie accepts that she doesn’t know everything. The whole idea of the book is that Colie has to learn to accept herself. Isabel and Morgan are the people that help her all throughout the book to realize she isn’t what she thinks she is. She could be so much more if she accepted herself and also accept the friendship that people want to have with her.
Morgan has to accept the fact that her fiancé is not treating her right. Isabel always tells Morgan that he cheats on her and asks why he doesn’t give Morgan a number so that she could call him and about the girl he is always with. Morgan never would accept the fact that he wasn’t actually in to her and that he was always using her. In the end, Morgan has to accept that she will be okay and that her and Mark are over.
Characters:
Colie is a15-year-old girl that no one really likes at home. She is very insecure about herself because of what people say about her. When she first met Morgan and Isabel her first impression was a little different. Colie would think of herself as ugly, annoying, and a lot of other things because of what people say about her at home. Throughout the book Colie has to make a lot of adjustments to herself in her mind. Morgan and Isabel ended up being those people that would lead her out of the bad thoughts about herself. Morgan was more calm and then she thought of Isabel as a spaz who makes a big deal about everything. Morgan is more of the sympathetic type of person. When Colie first meets Morgan she is all calm and asked Colie “Can I help you?” while Isabel is threatening to quit her job because of the customers that she had. Morgan wasn’t really worrying about what Isabel was doing because she had been used to it. Morgan had a fiancé named Mark who was a baseball player. He never gave her a number on where to call him, never could tell her where his games were, so she could go and see him play. Mark would just randomly come and surprise her in town and stay a night and leave the next morning. Isabel would always tell Morgan that he was using her and didn’t actually like her but Morgan would never listen. Then when Morgan got the idea to go and see him she found out that he was married to another girl who was also pregnant. When Morgan ran in after finding out that Mark was cheating on her with another girl Colie went into the bathroom and Morgan was talking to her about having best friends. Colie couldn’t really relate because she never really had a best friend but when Morgan was crying to Colie she was there to help. Isabel has a different approach on how to help people on how to interact with people. She has more of a foul mouth than any of the others. The first time we see her, she is described as a “tall bony girl throwing some kind of fit” who is cussing about her customers. She knows how to get people out of their shell but she doesn’t sugar coat things. When Colie, Morgan and Isabel are on their girls night out at the beach, Isabel tells Colie to “’Walk with your head up high,’ she [says] quietly, firmly. ‘Shoulders back. Don’t smile. And don’t look at anyone.’” This quote describes Isabel because she isn’t like Morgan who would be sweet about the way Colie looks, where Isabel is more commanding. When Colie first goes to Isabel’s house Isabel told Colie that “’ She needed to pluck her eyebrows and do something with her hair.’” Isabel told her straight up and didn’t mean for it to be rude but she said it for constructive criticism.
Vocabulary:
Jaunty- having a cheerful manner; “Morgan turned with a jaunty swing of her skirt.”
Mobile- decorative structure hanging from the ceiling; “The room was packed: canvases lined the walls, stacked against each other, and hanging from the ceiling were at least ten mobiles, all of them shifting in the breeze coming in behind me.”
Eccentric- slightly strange; “Did you know Mira’s well… a little eccentric?”
Delicately- subtlety; “Well I said, somewhat delicately, it’s just that you have so much here that’s already secondhand and not quite working.”
Stratification- arranging people into classes; “Either way, when I was only two months into a new school, fat with no friends (other fat kids wouldn’t hang out with me because I was new, part of the complex stratification even among the losers at Central Middle), my mother spent all the grocery money to buy me a new pair of Misses Plus jeans and a cute top.”
Similar Existing Works:
Keeping the Moon is similar to the movie The Last Song because both of the main characters are girls who are teenagers that are going to a different place to live over the summer. Ronnie in The Last Song was going to live with her dad for the summer because her parents were divorced and she didn’t want to go because she didn’t have a good relationship with her father. Colie was going to live in Colby with her Aunt Mira because her mom had to go on a tour in Europe. Another similarity the stories both have is an interest in boys. Ronnie meets a guy named Will at the beach and they end up liking each other and the Colie met Norman and they started off as friends and then later in the book they end up being in a relationship. The biggest similarity throughout the whole book was that Ronnie and Colie both started out as not really liking where they went for a while and as the story line went on they started to realize that it wasn’t that bad and that they both had to accept different things throughout the story. Colie had to start to accept that people do like her and that she is pretty but she has to let herself go and just be confident. On the other hand, Ronnie has to accept the fact that her father is sorry and that he didn’t tell her that he was sick because he wanted to spend every moment that he could with her and her little brother without being on medication. Both of the stories fall into the same genre of young adult fiction.
Major Conflict:
Colie’s lack of self-esteem is a pretty big conflict because it affects the way that she thinks of herself. Colie would believe everything that everyone would say about her and her lack of confidence would keep her from living and enjoying life. After a long time of people saying rude things, she began to believe them. People start to believe what they are being told because they don’t have anyone who likes them or tells them that they aren’t what other people say they are. When you never stand up for yourself everyone will start to take advantage of you and then you are stuck in a box until someone is there to help you to get out of it. Morgan and Isabel are the two girls in the book who take Colie out of her comfort zone and make sure to get Colie to think that she is pretty and that someone could actually like her but before that could happen she had to believe in herself and stand up to people when they say rude things about her. When Colie met Josh, a guy on the beach, when she was walking to the car to get beer for Isabel. Colie was kind of nervous to talk to him but she got through the conversation. Later, when he called her over again, she was nervous to go and Isabel told her to go. When she got there Caroline Dawes was standing there and said something rude and Colie stood up for herself. Colie finally had a break through and gained confidence in herself.
Symbolic Picture:
The reason that there is a symbolic connection is that Colie had Morgan and Isabel to pull her out of her hard times and make her feel better when she was upset. I have those friends, too, in Alex and Caroline (the other two girls in the picture). We dance together and we don’t always get along, but we will be friends forever. They know how to make me feel better and know me so well that by the look on my face they would know what kind of mood I am in. I wouldn’t have to tell them. I think that Colie, Morgan, and Isabel had that same kind of relationship as well.
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/426968970
For One More Day by Mitch Albom
Synopsis:
When Charley is not invited to his daughter Marie’s wedding he gets really upset and decides to go back to his old family home in Pepperville Beach to commit suicide. He tries and fails twice on the drive there. His mother has been dead for eight years but Charley sees her when he awakes from the second attempt. His mother (Posey) looks and acts exactly the same as she did before she died. Charley has the gift of one more day with his mother, which he spends going to visit some of her friends who need her help preparing for death. While he spends the day with his mother, he recalls memories from his childhood and young adulthood with growing up with a single mother and very distant and disappointing father.
Characters:
Charley “Chick” Benetto: He is the main character of this book. He had a baseball career when he was younger but it never went anywhere. He became a salesman and an alcoholic. Charley is a pretty disappointed and unhappy man and comes to the conclusion that he wants to commit suicide. He feels bad about not being there when his mother passed away. After the one special day (limbo stage between life and death) that he got to spend with his mother, he starts to live his life more fully.
Pauline “Posey” Benetto: Charley’s mother has been dead for eight years and is happy to spend one day with her son again. When Charley was just a little boy, she kicked her husband out of the house when she found out that he had another wife, becoming a single mother raising two small children. This was in the early 60’s in a small town, and she was not treated well for being a divorcee. She spent her life being a hair dresser and a nurse. When Charley got into college she was very proud of him and then she was very disappointed when he decided to drop out to become a baseball player. In the day that she spends with Charley, she teaches him many lessons so that when he wakes up from his coma, his idea of who he thought he was changes.
Maria: She is Chick’s estranged daughter. We don’t know why they are so estranged but maybe it is because she felt betrayed by Chick after the divorce. She decides not to invite her father to her wedding. When she was fourteen, she was the one who found her grandmother's body and a little more than a year later her family collapsed. Two years after Chick’s suicide attempt, Maria found him at a baseball park in Pepperville Beach and they reconnected. She is actually the narrator of this story, but we don’t find that out until the end.
Essential Conflict:
The big conflict of this story is that Chick is unhappy with his life. When he found out that his daughter got married it pushed him over the edge. He went to Pepperville Beach and, on the way, attempted to kill himself twice. When he jumped of the overpass and awoke to see his mother is when the story hit its turning point.
Quotes:
“Let me guess. You want to know why I tried to kill myself.”
“This is a story about a family and, as there is a ghost involved, you might call it a ghost story.”
“I was a mama’s boy from the day on.”
“You can’t lose your mother, Charley.”
“If my mother said it, I believed it.”
Main Theme:
The main theme of For One More Day seems to be betrayal. Throughout the story there are three different timelines and betrayal is present in all of them. One timeline follows his childhood, where Chick feels betrayed by his mother because she won't let him see his father. In the present time Chick feels that he has let-down his mother because he wasn't there when she had a heart attack. Also, Chick feels ashamed because he turned his back on everything that his mother wanted for him. The theme continues in this timeline when Chick realizes that his father had actually had another wife and family. The third timeline are letters that he had written specifically about times that he had betrayed his mom by not standing up for her. These are juxtaposed to writings about times that his mother stood up for him, which makes the theme more prominent.
"Video" Commentary:
I really enjoyed this book because I liked the way that there were three story lines and when you get closer to the end of the book they all come together. The way Albom wrote this book made the story also a lot more interesting. Even though it was a sad book, it had a good ending. After reading this book, I would like to read more books that he has written and compare the way he wrote them.
Audio Track:
"One Sweet Day" by Mariah Carey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX6m1xNwmgY
"The Start of Something Big" Bobby Darin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIZh0JHT6lY
Goodreads link:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/476816534